The Crucial Transition

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There's a field of sense that we have that if you pack on enough cortex, layers and layers and layers of cortex, or neural networks. at some point, like in the sydney harris cartoon that you've used, that i've used. And then a miracle happens. It it feels like like something like magic happens if you just get enough cortical activity going. I'm assuming that's an incorrectway to think about it. The best case that has ever been made along these lines was made by dogles hos ter in godo eshebach,. That enormous volume of his from the seventies. People who think we do are appealing at some level to some form of

In this expansive conversation, Michael Shermer speaks with Bernardo Kastrup, the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). Shermer and Kastrup discuss: materialism, idealism, dualism, monism, panpsychism, free will, determinism, consciousness, the problem of other minds, artificial intelligence, out of body and near-death experiences, model dependent realism, and the ultimate nature of reality.